Who Is Listening To What You Tell Alexa?

Alexa has dominated the smart speaker market with more than 100 million devices that have already been sold.

But who might be listening to what Alexa records? You might be surprised to discover that Amazon workers actually get paid to listen to what you tell Alexa.

There are thousands of employees who are listening to voice recording data that gets captured by the smart devices in millions of homes. Why are they listening to the recordings? Because they are paid to transcribe that information and annotate them, the information then gets fed back to Amazon's software with the ultimate goal of using all of that data that gets collected to help improve human speech comprehension.

These are Amazon employees coming from different areas that might be listening to the recordings, many are contractors, but there are also full-time employees who are listening as well.

They could be located in a number of countries: India, United States, Costa Rica, Romania, etc. These individuals who are listening to the recordings allegedly have to sign nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from being able to speak about the program. It's estimated that they listen to roughly 1,000 audio clips per 9 hour work day.

It's likely that there will be occasions when the device is going to record something, with the potential to be shared, that the speaker would probably prefer to be kept private. If they have difficulty with a particular recording that they might be trying to categorize, it's alleged that the team reviewing the recordings uses an internal chat room to communicate with each other and share files etc.

It's alleged that they have heard recordings that they themselves have found to be upsetting or potentially criminal.

If they do hear something alarming, the company reportedly has certain procedures in place to deal with such a scenario. However, former employees have alleged that when they went to the company to act on such a scenario, they were told that it wasn't the job of the company to interfere.

Privacy issues have been a top concern surrounding these smart speaker devices since they came to market.

Many security experts have voiced their concerns along the way, urging caution with these devices because they are vulnerable to hacking and might record more than you want it to.

In one instance, a user had their private communications unintentionally recorded and then sent to a random individual on their contact lists without their permission.

Amazon maintains that they take the privacy and security of their customers seriously and they suggest that it's only a small sample of voice recordings that they are sifting through to try and improve the overall experience. They also offer an option in the settings to disable the data collection; for those users who might not want their voice recordings being used to try and develop any new features. Other reports have also listed further security options for those who might want to increase their privacy while using the device.

Still, there might be a few owners of these devices out there who aren't aware that Amazon contractors will be listening to their intimate conversations that they might not have intended to record.

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